Page 312 - Western Civilization A Brief History, Volume I To 1715 9th - Jackson J. Spielvogel

their period (from the mid-fourteenth to the mid- sixteenth century) an age of rebirth, believing that they had restored arts and letters to their former glory after they had been “neglected” or “dead” for centuries. The humanists also saw their age as one of accomplished individuals who dominated the landscape of their time. Michelangelo, the great Italian artist of the early sixteenth century, and Pope Julius II, the “warrior pope,” were two such titans. The artist’s temperament and the pope’s temper led to many lengthy and often loud quarrels between the two. The pope had hired Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, a difficult task for a man long accustomed to being a sculptor. Michelangelo undertook the project but refused for a long time to allow anyone, including the pope, to see his work. Julius grew anxious, pestering Michelangelo on a regular basis about when the ceiling would be finished. Exasperated by the pope’s requests, Michelangelo once replied, according to Giorgio Vasari, his contemporary biographer, that the ceiling would be completed “when it satisfies me as an artist.” The pope responded, “And we want you to satisfy us and finish it soon,” and then threatened that if Michelangelo did not “finish the ceiling quickly [the pope] would have him thrown down from the scaffolding.” Fearing the pope’s anger, Michelangelo “lost no time in doing all that was wanted” and quickly completed the ceiling, one of the great masterpieces in the history of Western art.
The humanists’ view of their age as a rebirth of the classical civilization of the Greeks and Romans ultimately led historians to use the French word Renaissance to identify this age. Although recent historians have emphasized the many elements of continuity between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the latter age was also distinguished by its own unique characteristics.
Characteristics of the Italian Renaissance
Q FOCUS QUESTION: What characteristics distinguish the Renaissance from the Middle Ages?
Renaissance means “rebirth.” Many people who lived in Italy between 1350 and 1550 believed that they were witnessing a rebirth of antiquity or Greco-Roman
civilization, marking a new age. To them, the thou- sand or so years between the end of the Roman Empire and their own era was a middle period (the “Middle Ages”), characterized by darkness because of its lack of classical culture. Historians of the nine- teenth century later used similar terminology to describe this period in Italy. The Swiss historian and art critic Jacob Burckhardt (YAHK-ub BOORK-hart) created the modern concept of the Renaissance in his celebrated work Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published in 1860. He portrayed Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as the birthplace of the modern world and saw the revival of antiquity, the “perfecting of the individual,” and secularism (“worldliness of the Italians”) as its distinguishing fea- tures. Burckhardt established the framework for all modern interpretations of the period. Although con- temporary scholars do not believe that the Renais- sance represents a sudden or dramatic cultural break with the Middle Ages (as Burckhardt argued)—there was, after all, much continuity between the two peri- ods in economic, political, and social life—the Renais- sance can still be viewed as a distinct period of European history that manifested itself first in Italy and then spread to the rest of Europe. What, then, are the characteristics of the Italian Renaissance?
Renaissance Italy was largely an urban society. The city-states, especially those of northern Italy, became the centers of Italian political, economic, and social life. In this new urban society, a secular spirit emerged as increasing wealth created new possibilities for the enjoyment of worldly things (see the box on p. 275).
Above all, the Renaissance was an age of recovery from the calamitous fourteenth century, a time for the slow process of recuperating from the effects of the Black Death, political disorder, and economic recession. This recovery was accompanied by a rediscovery of the culture of classical antiquity. Increasingly aware of their own historical past, Italian intellectuals became intensely interested in the Greco-Roman culture of the ancient Mediterranean world. This revival of classical antiquity (the Middle Ages had in fact preserved much of ancient Latin culture) affected activities as diverse as politics and art and led to new attempts to reconcile the pagan philosophy of the Greco-Roman world with Christian thought, as well as new ways of viewing human beings.
A revived emphasis on individual ability became a characteristic of the Italian Renaissance. As the fif- teenth-century Florentine architect Leon Battista Alberti (al-BAYR-tee) expressed it, “Men can do all
274 Chapter 12 Recovery and Rebirth: The Age of the Renaissance
Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.